Three days until election night

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

4:54 p.m. CDT – "It's the most beautiful time in Minnesota... Right after that first frost we get a few weeks of just golden weather here," Garrison Keillor says on the radio and I know he's right because I am driving outside the theater where he is broadcasting.

I'm in St. Paul, Minnesota following the Rock the Vote bus... or in this case the absence of the bus because it's in the shop today. The weather here is golden. Sixty degrees outside and as pretty as you have any right to expect a place to be. At the University of Minnesota, where we were earlier today, the students were out in T-shirts and jeans and one poor refugee from last night's halloween celebrations was still wandering down Hennepin Avenue in a foam Tea Cup clutching a beer and bracing herself for the raging hangover headed her way.

I spent the afternoon calling young people along with a dozen other volunteers for Rock the Vote and the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group (MPIRG) in a process known as phone banking. Phone banking can be a nightmare. Four years ago, I worked for a candidate in the Iowa caucuses and spent twelve hours a day on the phone. I got ear bruises. My throat was always dry and I started to get sick. I learned to smile when you call a voter because they hear it in your voice, that affecting a southern accent makes people more friendly, and to make my pitch personal. It can be awful work. Sometimes you will hear a football game in the background when a voter picks up the phone and you know that he is going to tear you apart for interrupting. Sometimes you will hear someone yelling or a shower running or a car honking and you will know it's a bad time. Once I thought I heard a gunshot.

Right now each of the presidential campaigns have hundreds, maybe thousands, of callers phone banking swing voters. There are probably hundreds or maybe thousands more people calling from each of the tight congressional races. The closer we get to the election, the more people there are who are cursing the invention of the phone and signing up for the national do not call registry. At the end of the day, the only calls a person wants from a stranger are the ones telling him he has won a sweepstakes.

But people do respond to these calls and most of the people I called tolerated me for the thirty seconds I took to remind them to get out on election day. A few even had questions about what to bring to the polls (ID and utility bill is a good idea in most states) or where they could find their polling place (the election center on rockthevote.com has them if you enter your address). I made 150 phone calls before taking off to talk to the kids coming to tonight's concert.

5:50 p.m. CDT – "Free T-shirts," Aaron James, the bus tour DJ is yelling at strangers. It's like throwing a zebra to lions. Frenzy ensues. They have just opened the door at the Roy Wilkins center – where the Beastie Boys, Tenacious D, and Ben Harper will be playing tonight – and the line charges our table for two minutes before the traffic abruptly stops. The early crowd, the fans who want to be right up next to the stage are through and now we will hover here for a few more hours and wait for the people who are alright with standing in the second row.

6:30 p.m. CDT – A vendor has started yelling "Peanuts, pop, beer. Get them here." It rhymes. Free T-shirts is still a pretty powerful draw, but it's tough to compete with peanuts and beer, so a few of the new arrivals are drifting towards the other guy.

7:13 p.m. CDT – Sound check has begun, so I am off for the night.